An Overview of Free Online Invoice Software

I got tired of tracking invoices for clients using an Excel spreadsheet. I knew there must be some good solutions for on-line invoices, so here’s what I found. All of these had a paid counterpart, and some of the free versions were too limited for all but experimental use. E.g. when they say there’s a limit of managing only 2 clients, that means you have to delete one and create a new client (entering name and address) each time you have to send an invoice to someone new.

Billing Manager lets you easily create invoices

Billing Manager

This is the only service I found that offered unlimited invoices and unlimited clients for free. They are iPhone compatible, which means their site is iPhone friendly (it’s relatively fast), but they don’t have a standalone app yet. I had some serious problems importing my OS X Address Book contacts (see below), and their documentation didn’t help, but they responded promptly to my emails. In order to use Credit Cards and Electronic Checks, you have to set up an account with QuickBooks merchant service, which will run $15/month. One other irk with this software is that it requires you to disable your pop-up blocker for the preview functions to work.

Freshbooks

The free version gives you one login and lets you manage only 3 clients. They have auto-bill gateways so you can charge credit cards using Paypal (yes, even using a basic Paypal account). This looks to be a nice and professional service… they even sent me a nice snail-mail sample invoice welcoming me to my trial account.

Lite Accounting

With the free account, you cannot use a custom logo on invoices, and you are limited to 5 invoices per month. They boast the “most affordable” solution, and yes, their full membership is almost as cheap as some of the others’ entry level membership.

In summary, I thought that Billing Manager was the best deal out there for those users who need a basic service (and who aren’t simply evaluating). Billing Manager was the only one that offered unlimited invoices and unlimited clients.

Outlook Address Book CSV Fields

As I mentioned, I had trouble working with Billing Manager’s address book importer. It worked fine for my Outlook address book, but it did not work well with with my OS X Address Book. This is probably because I’ve got it synced with my 10 year old Yahoo! address book (yikes!), and there are some real messy fields in there. So here are the steps you can use to get your address book into Billing Manager’s format:

1. Unfortunately, OS X’s Address Book Application does not allow for you to export your addresses into a CSV format. There is an Address Book to CSV Exporter linked on the Apple web site, but it won’t work for this task. You need a program that enables you to export a header row. Download the Address Book Exporter by David Martin & Gwenhiver.net. It allows for far greater flexibility. Download it.

Once inside the Address Book Exporter, click on the “Configure Settings”. Check the “Write column titles as first line” — this is your header row.

Check most of the fields (see image). Outlook doesn’t seem to have columns for any Instant Message addresses, so I left those out of my export.

Open the resulting file in Excel (I know I know… groan… I don’t know another way to do this). Open another blank workbook and paste Outlook’s Header Row values (below) into the first row. Two tips here: first remove the commas. Also have a look at Excel’s “Paste Special…” feature. There’s a checkbox in there to “transpose” the paste. This will paste rows into columns or columns into rows.

Copy the columns from your OS X Address Book Export into the matching columns in the Outlook-friendly workbook.

7 thoughts on “An Overview of Free Online Invoice Software”

Hey Everett! Thanks for taking the time to look into all of these and for including FreshBooks! Just so you know, with our free account, one staff member can have access along with the administrator. So, two people in one company can access the account for free. Feel free to send me any questions if you have them, and thanks again!

Everett, we greatly appreciate being part of this review! In regards to our free plan, the branding is a small Powered by Greenerbilling logo at the bottom of the invoice. The automated e-mails from our system have our web address at the bottom. The branding is not present for any of our other plans.

This will be an exciting year for Greenerbilling! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about our service.

Another invoicing option is Time59 (www.time59.com). It’s targeted at solo professionals and is a great solution if you don’t need (or want to pay for) the multi-user capability of something like Freshbooks (great product by the way). Bottom line: If you are solo and bill by the hour it is definitely worth a look. The first 30 days are free.

I have used many invoicing applications for my small business and for very long time kept hearing about Freshbooks.com. But from my personal experience I would highly recommend http://www.invoicera.com. Otherwise another alternative could be http://www.zoho.com